What if you created a more productive employee base by giving them time off?

In this guest post, Rachael Lonergan, head of strategy at Foundation, discusses why introducing flex time for staff to undertake exercise and mental health is an investment in her company’s future.

Work/life balance.

Some people don’t believe in it and others think it’s unrealistic in an ‘always connected’ world. Yet there are literally millions of articles online about how to achieve this elusive concept. We really want it, but we’re not necessarily sure how to get it.

Meanwhile, the technology that promised to make our lives easier and more efficient is not meeting that promise, with Australian workers logging more unpaid work hours and less personal time than ever before (and wondering where the demarcation between work and personal time begins and ends).

As we all know (and most of us have experienced at one time or another) job burn-out is a huge problem that contributes to staff turnover and lack of productivity. And yet despite us being aware of this, as an industry we don’t seem to be coming up with effective solutions that make a real and positive difference to the people who power our companies.

The ongoing ‘Health and Wellbeing In Australia Survey’ by the Australian Psychological Society identified the Top 5 stressors for Australian workers as:

Personal finances – 49 per cent;

Family issues – 45 per cent;

Personal health – 44 per cent;

Trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle – 40 per cent; and

Issues with the health of others close to us – 38 per cent

People are stressed about their health and their lifestyle. We’re stressed about being stressed. The Black Dog Institute says that 20% of us are suffering from a mental illness in any given year and 65% do not seek treatment. The vast majority of those people are productive, valuable workers performing at a high level. But sometimes their stress continues unabated and they burn-out, taking with them experience and talent which is very difficult to replace.

With these concerns on our agenda at our recent Management Planning Day, we wondered what tangible actions we could take to communicate with our team to let them know that we take this issue seriously?

Generally, we don’t have a high stress culture and because we’re a boutique agency we have enough oversight to be able to nip issues in the bud. We’ve previously provided seminars on health and wellness at work. We provide fresh fruit every day. We have access to all the support services that a company within a big network like OMG offers.

We want our team members to be as healthy and happy as possible, because frankly, we get more productive teams that way.

And then we talked about the stress of getting out of the office to a yoga class because it’s going to make us late getting back after a lunchtime session. Or making an appointment with a psychologist without having to tell everyone why you’re late into the office every Tuesday. Or maybe you love to meditate in the mornings or you like to power walk in the afternoons but put those aside because you feel the weight of the expectation to always be at your desk; to always be connected.

And we realised after talking through the different scenarios that what we could give our team that they would benefit from more than anything else, was 1) time and 2) trust. Specifically, time to pursue their personal health goals without judgement or fear. And trust that if given this time, they would use it wisely and to their best advantage.

Today, Foundation is proud to be announcing a new initiative, ‘Wellness Leave’. It’s not a huge demand on the company at only three hours per month per employee (or less than 10 minutes per work day when averaged out). And how they use it, is entirely up to the individual.

Maybe within a month they’ll take 9 x 20 minute power walks, attend 3 x 1 hour counselling sessions or, instead of ditching it, get to 12 x lunchtime gym classes using the extra time to shower and change.

It could be time for a massage, 10 minutes of meditation per day, or an early finish to access some ‘me time’ at the hairdresser or nail salon. As long as they’re free of external meetings and commitments, their Wellness Leave time will be sacrosanct.

Some people may have problems that pop up that require more than three hours per month, and this will be handled at the discretion of their manager, as would normally occur.

But the point is to actively encourage – and, in fact, insist – that people step away from their desks and do something positive for their personal wellbeing.

Of course, being a media agency, we love data. So, in a few months time we’ll survey the team and get their feedback on whether they’ve found this to be a useful initiative.

It doesn’t feel like it can hurt and we hope it will prove to be a useful tool for retention. And in the meantime if we help some of our valuable people stay happy, healthy, engaged and productive, then the company will be the ultimate beneficiary of Wellness Leave.

Nice approach, but I can’t help but view 3 hours per month as a bit of an interesting number.

I’d be curious to look at how that stacks up versus what your employees actually put in, and wonder if quantifying the number of hours will be more detrimental than beneficial.

If you tell me I have ‘trust’ and ‘time’ to take the odd afternoon off to get some stuff done, or an extra few minutes to shower after a lunch-time run, or nip out early to beat the traffic and see my psych, I’d sing your praises.

Start banking that as ‘3 hours per month, anything extra at the manager’s discretion’, and I start thinking “Well, I’m paid 9-5 with an hour lunch… but I’m always in 30 minutes early and usually stay till 5:30 or 6… I eat lunch at my desk, so you’re getting an extra hour and a half out of me a day, at minimum… and hell, I work at least one weekend every month… wait, I’m giving you the equivalent of an extra FOURTY hours a week, and you want me to thank you for THREE HOURS back? That’s not fair!”
I’m very curious to see what the long-term impact is of this initiative, and if you start seeing staff coming in precisely on time, leaving precisely on time, and using their full lunch break…

I love the idea, I just know I’d hate having it so formalised and quantified

I believe you’ll find it is an initiative that returns more ten-fold than it costs! I wait with anticipation of your statistics. The real value may be seen in the medium to long term however – with retention, and energy in the innovation and wellbeing of your team.

It saddens me a little that these sorts of things have to be formally put in place to ensure that teams are supported; when it’s likely in organisations like Foundations and the many businesses I’ve been part of it is often (as it should be) inherent in the culture that wellbeing is encouraged. However sometimes formally is just the push some companies need to remind them that a business and a community is nothing without the health of it’s people.

Great article, Rachel, and congrats on the new initiative Foundation! It’s a very real/growing issue that you’re addressing. Well done! Making it ok to get up and go for a walk or do something positive for your mind/body/soul seems like the most normal thing in the world…and yet for many it isn’t.

I think we should put to bed the idea that work life balance isn’t achievable. It is. What isn’t achievable is everything you want from work AND life. At different life stages we all have different priorities. As a father of 2, mine are clear to me and so I know I have to compromise on what I can expect to achieve at work in exchange for the flexibility to father the way I want to. To me that seems fair.

Really interesting article Rachel. I get into this area a lot with employees and employees. It’s tricky. I think everyone genuinely wants to improve it. Like “overworked” I’d rather it was looser and less formal. I suspect you would too but (probably) Legal and HR got their hands on it and pointed out where it might go wrong without more structure !! Either way, congratulations on doing something rather than just talking and good luck with it.

@ overworked – I agree with you that quantifying it like that may be detrimental. The reality in my organisation is that I trust some people to work hard and if/when they need time off or to work from home then that is never an issue. I trust them to behave like the adults they are and appreciate the extra miles they consistently go for the business. The issue is the people who do take the piss. It only takes one or two people to betray trust, and it is for that reason that, should you want to make it official, you need to measure it for all. You could argue that you don’t want that sort of employee in the first place but you don’t always have a choice. Some of the Virgin businesses don’t have any annual leave policy – you take time as and when you need it. That would be my approach if it wasn’t for the piss takers.

Just wanted to clarify some points about Wellness Leave in the light of some comments above.

The idea came about as a way to encourage our team mates to think about their physical and mental health needs and take some action, before they reach anything close to burnout. It’s also recognition that human beings have personal challenges and they don’t always want to broadcast those challenges to their workplace. Unlike sick leave, where many companies require medical certificates, Wellness Leave has no such requirement. We trust our staff.

Rather than quantifying the time taken, of more interest will be the time not taken. If for some reason people don’t take up the benefit we’ll try to understand what is going on in their corner of the world that stopped them from taking it up. The only ‘formal’ component to Wellness Leave, is that the employee enter their leave onto a group calendar so we know who is in and who is out. This is a necessity for any business and will help us manage workflow and client expectations. Wellness Leave does not replace other needs people have for flexible working conditions such as working from home or personal leave. It is additional.

At Foundation we have a very dedicated and engaged workforce and a service orientated culture. We want to keep that, and it’s our contention that we’re more likely to, if our employees are happy and healthy. We hope that the Wellness Leave initiative will help us achieve that goal.

In the journalism industry, this is an area that is declining almost as rapidly as newspaper readership/ad revenue. The introduction of new technology is effectively wiping out the proverbial line in the sand between work and life. The constant call by media management for greater efficiency underlines a brutality that constantly attacks the notion of balance. While staff numbers decline, the workload remains and the pressure on remaining staff to increase their efficiency to carry that workload impacts on health and morale.